There are quite a few interesting ideas around this area. I see this as all being about limiting or selecting the music that we see/play - this is a good idea when we have lots of it! But there are some variants which are worth exploring. I think there are two parts to this:
(1) how do you select/indicate the music set (2) what do you do with it once you've got it Slimserver and its many plugins (some of which are erland's!) has lots of ways of generating a playlist (browse, random play, MusicIP, etc). As well as the obvious artist/album/title data to use as a basis for selection, there is also the flexible "genre" (especially if you allow multiple genres, which I find very useful). Some of the comments in related threads are about ever more sophisticated or flexible ways of doing this (please allow me a quick plug for my own request for a User Defined tag we can use for browsing - http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2700 and its partner http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2701 to allow flexible browsing) But for the most part this is all directed at producing a playlist, which is of course only one use for a music set. The "collection" idea is a different use... its been asked for in a variety of ways, usually to do with hiding adult material, but also separating different users' music. This is a use of an identified music set which is different from just creating a playlist- its about limiting the view of the database to some subset (from which playlists are then created). Its interesting that the OP on the "Collection" thread was, I think, asking for two things at once: first, a sophisticated way of identifying a set of music (ie more complex than plain old genres) and then secondly a new way of using that set (as a view of the database). What my ramblings are trying to get to, I think, is that ideally we should be separating the ideas of (1) identifying a set of music and (2) using it for something. For identifying the music set, we want to be able to define sets of music - both statically and dynamically - based on standard and possibly non-standard tags and queries thereon. Having identified a set of music, we might want to use it as a playlist, or we might want to use it to limit our view of the database, or some other use I can't think of right now. If we don't get this separation of concepts clear, we risk having a load of plugins which address different areas of the problem which don't quite fit together, which would be a shame. Any other thoughts out there? Ceejay -- ceejay ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ceejay's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=148 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=21354 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
